By RAJA MURTHY FEBRUARY 8, 2018 12:19 PM
On February 5, I officially became part of the largest ever biometric national identity process in human history – getting my 12-digit Aadhaar or Unique Identification number from the governmental Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
Simultaneously, I joined 1.1 billion other Indians already with an Aadhaar number, and entered uncharted territory. India’s Supreme Court is pondering over serious concerns raised about the biometrics-based Aadhaar ID system – from threats to privacy to risks of potential misuse from a snooping governmental Big Brother.
A core concern is making Aadhaar compulsory – with banks for months threatening to freeze accounts that have no Aadhaar number linked to them by March 31. The bankers’ threats may have no constitutional or legal sanction, but such possibilities push India into an unprecedented era of Orwellian nightmares, from intrusions of privacy, to smothering of freedom. American whistleblower Edward Snowden has pitched into the debate, declaring that the Aadhaar biometric ID system has loopholes that leave it open for abuse.
Anxiety about Aadhaar abuse increased after enterprising reporters declared that they had been able to buy private Aadhaar data for paltry sums of around 500 rupees (less than US$8), and get fake Aadhaar IDs at cheaper rates.
The Indian government dismissed the exposés and decided instead to haul the messengers to the dungeons, pressing criminal charges against the reporters for their troubles. That caused more uproar, but left unanswered questions of whether and how much India really needs the biometric Aadhaar.
Bemused citizens can wonder whether the 12-digit Aadhaar number is the promised genial genie delivering greater efficiency and integrity in governance, or a demon in disguise ready to unleash all manner of sneaky devilry on unsuspecting citizens.
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Members of Parliament from West Bengal state, eastern India, protest in New Delhi against Aadhaar.
The Aadhaar national identity project was a brainchild of the previous government, and showed every symptom of fading out as a multibillion-rupee white elephant. And then Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to turbocharge it, and use Aadhaar to spearhead his much-touted mission to end corruption in India.
With unique Aadhaar numbers linked to individual bank accounts, life becomes tough for the black-money tribe using multiple bank accounts to dodge the taxman. Likewise, Aadhaar exposes another favorite black-money dodge – benami properties, or proxy ownership by registering possessions under names of family members, relatives and sometimes even the domestic help and the car driver.
That anti-corruption mission is fine, and is a primary reason that many Indians have uncomplainingly gone through the Aadhaar registering process this winter, much like the winter of 2016 when the country was frantically queuing up exchanging currency notes demonetized under a similar anti-corruption motive.
Being a rebel by nature, the compulsion aspect of Aadhaar found no favor with me – and the only way I could find out more was plunge into the process. The Aadhaar registration form downloaded from the Internet has an opening line dripping with irony: “Aadhaar enrollment is free and voluntary.”
It was free all right, but hardly voluntary – with the Modi government arm-twisting citizens with all manner of governmental services that need Aadhaar, including fundamental rights like operating a personal bank account. Even mobile phones need to be linked with the Aadhaar ID number. Unless of course, we exercise the “voluntary” right to spend a lifetime on endless arguments from an increasing number of demands to see the Aadhaar Card – from bank officials to hotel clerks.
“Aadhaar” means “foundation” or “base,” and the system’s basic mission statement says, “To provide for good governance, efficient, transparent and targeted delivery of subsidies, benefits and services….” But like a kitchen knife that can be used both to cook food and to kill, Aadhaar’s double-edged life seems to have be laid bare by media reports popping up about data leaks.
The Aadhaar enrollment process seems efficient overall, considering the mind-boggling logistics of recording biometric data from more than 1.2 billion pairs of hands and eyes.
The process allows for a month for the postman to deliver the Aadhaar card, but in two weeks I received my Aadhaar number online, after I ambled off to the registry office for the second time. I was asked to give a colleague’s mobile-phone number in a missing blank – I being one of the very rare species in these 21st-century days who do not own a mobile phone.
The efficiency was impressive, with an e-mail received by the time I returned from the Aadhaar office – a message of a kind I had never received before, a doorway to a helpful or headache-filled biometric age: “Your Aadhaar number XXXX XXXX 2339 was used successfully to carry out Authentication using ‘Fingerprint’ on 05/02/2018 at 15:57:13 Hrs at a device deployed by ‘UIDAI Internal System Monitoring’…. If you haven’t carried out this Authentication, please call us at 1947 or forward this mail to help@uidai.gov.in.”
That’s a good number to call for worries about Aadhaar and individual freedom – 1947 was the year India gained independence.
I was one of the fortunate few who had little trouble with Prime Minister Modi’s two big wheezes, the demonetization frenzy last winter and the Aadhaar scramble this winter. Kind media colleagues ensured I did not have to stand in painful queues like millions of others suffering the runaround.
But similar questions linger, both with demonetization and Aadhaar: harassed citizens being asked to invest time, effort and patience in two nationwide mega-upheavals supposedly to fight corruption. The net result as yet seems to be only the small fry being caught in the anti-corruption net, while the big fish with Swiss bank accounts seem to have been left untouched.
The Aadhaar data collected and used or misused seems a genie easier to let out of the bottle than pull back in. The Supreme Court is yet to decide on Aadhaar use, but the general elections next year will deliver a more accurate verdict of how much India trusts Prime Minister Modi’s anti-corruption motives and methods.
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INDIA OPINION BIOMETRICS AADHAAR UNIQUE IDENTIFICATION AUTHORITY OF INDIA INDIA BANKING NARENDRA MODI DEMONETIZATION ANTI-CORRUPTION EDWARD SNOWDEN
Raja Murthy is an independent journalist based in Mumbai contributing to Asia Times since 2003, The Statesman since 1990, and formerly for Times of India, Economic Times, Elle, Wisden.com etc. He shuttles between Mumbai and the Himalayas.
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How popular culture can bridge East-West divide
By TOM VELK AND JADE XIAO FEBRUARY 8, 2018 4:27 AM (UTC+8)
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How does the way China appears on Western social media (and vise versa) affect Sino-American relations? The media inform, guide action, sway opinions and entertain. Relevant for the authors of this piece, they provide an engine that may be used by leaders in all departments of aggregate human civilization to control, or at least guide, their followers and anyone else available to be captured by efficient rhetoric. The effect is to encourage media consumers to follow paths of action consistent with the goals of those leaders. Think US President Donald Trump and Twitter.
We advocate free trade in esthetics! Our purpose in this essay is to suggest a surprising but much-needed element or component in “media feed filtering” that will allow consumers of media to separate real from fake content. Our element is composed of pop culture: because it is a version of the artistic sense that is available to ordinary people everywhere. Our idea is a way to use the same to make the job of separating real from fake easier or at least more natural for the audience.
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The idea that the heart is sometimes better than the head when it comes knowing the difference between real and “fake” news, rules, and wise counsel, the belief that when it comes to human affairs, real-world politics, social norms and religious teaching, heart, and head must be in balance is common to both Asian and western culture. Poetry, ritual, tradition and the esthetic sense, since they emanate or radiate unsullied from the deepest wells of our true human nature, have the power to discern and distinguish the real from the “fake” atoms of information, now mixed among the welter of “information traffic noise.” We say the esthetic sense helps the observer to see human truths, find good rules for behavior, or simply to truly see “what is really going on.” We report below our evidence that this “poetic” or “artistic” technique exists and is trusted in both East and West. Alas, we don’t have today’s needed cultural filter’s design: We only say that those who seek it should be sure they look for an esthetic element in the “truth-finding” machine they finally design or discover.
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If East and West are really to know about one another, fake news must be eliminated from the market, or at least clean news must be available
If East and West are really to know about one another, fake news must be eliminated from the market, or at least clean news must be available. Clean news, the clear news, is especially useful for young people on both sides of the Pacific. They are accustomed to getting material, even technical information mixed in with esthetic content: constantly “plugged in at lunch,” they consume data along with entertainment/pleasure in figurative Guo qiao mixian (crossing the bridge soup, Kunming, Yunnan province). That classic mixture of meat, eggs, noodles, and veggies, all under a thin layer of oil, has the key ingredient, fresh flowers, added only at the moment of consumption. The esthetic component in East-West communication, the fresh flowers of clean news, must find its way into our Cross-Pacific trade menu if the next hundred years – a time during which China will have re-acquired its traditional leading role in the world – are to go well for us all. It won’t be easy.
Even Chinese-speaking young people, those born in the West of parents who crossed the ocean into the sunrise, are not sufficiently adept at using the ever-more sophisticated machinery of technical communication to feel completely at home when they are, electronically speaking, back in their ancestors’ world. They don’t really know the ever-changing, subtle cultural language used by their peers – by those young Chinese people who have not been transplanted into the West.
What is missing? Mere language, absent its natural roots in cultural rituals, rites, and conventions, is inadequate to communicate at the level of esthetic delicacy and precision needed if the world is to build a “bridge without nails” linking China with the West. (Sometimes called Leonardo’s self-supporting bridge, the beautifully arched no-nails walkway, made entirely from simple straight sticks, was likely copied by him from a Chinese original.) We want a natural connection made with the “straight sticks” of competing, alternate rites, rituals and cultural habits, back and forth, one stick at a time, one stick from the East and one from the West, conjoined with imagination, wit, balanced tensions: such a thing is needed to bridge the wide Pacific.
The missing element for “overseas China” is a deep and natural understanding of China’s Home Ritual. Rites and rituals are subsidiary to the central Chinese concept of Li-Zhi (translated as patriarchal rules). This symbol/idea captures notions of proper actions, correct manners and socially correct standards of behavior in all the various aspects and multi-faceted forms of group interactions, ranging across the family, to business, to politics writ large. The language used in these various forms of social life is subsidiary or at least profoundly controlled by the rites and rituals of life, and for this reason, a mere understanding of the literal language, standing alone, is not adequate to understand the real relationships and purpose of any particular example of social ceremony or collaboration. In China, all-pervasive habitual social, even spiritual rites and rituals give to everyday actions a significant moral reality. In the West, a parallel form of rituals comprises the morality-inducing Judeo-Christian notions of honor, chivalry, and propriety.
Esthetic rituals police behavior. No society can afford to have a cop on every corner. No community, not even one as simple as a nuclear family, can employ constant vigilance, resort to violence to enforce its rules, or write down all the regulations that must be observed in order to maintain good order.
On both sides of the Pacific, indeed in all human societies that survive and thrive, etiquette, good manners, honor, self-respect – call it by its many names – is the frame, the foundation, the bedrock and the roof-beam of the social house within which the citizens of a civil society find shelter. During much of human history, that sheltering collection of habit, tradition, ritual and protective shelter takes the form of art, esthetics, religion, and ritual. If East and West are to live together in the same “house” they must find common notions of “good manners” or “social good deportment”, perhaps in the shape of today’s art forms, some of the crude, and vulgar (in the sense that they form today’s worldwide shared esthetic environment of popular music, movies, and simple entertainment).
Traditionally, Chinese conventions and rites cover the whole range of human conduct. Ceremonials control modes of personal sacrifice, maturation from childhood to adulthood, marriage, war, one’s obligations to neighbors; there are rituals concerning dying and obligations to ancestors. The “Five Rites” are Ji-li, Jian-li, Bin-li, Jun-li, and Xiong-li. The pre-Qin book “Classic of Rites” comprises prescription and prescriptions for all Five Rites, and in addition includes material from the conversations of Confucius (Li-Zhi) covering questions of politics, law, religion, art, and history. There are rules for sitting, standing, talking, even sleeping – don’t sleep belly down, assume a slightly bent, bow position. Our interest will be in business, production and trading rituals. By following the protocols laid out in such conventions, ordinary people are able, without the necessity of exploring the philosophy of governance that is the logical foundation for the book (and others like it) to behave well, to avoid unnecessary conflict, to presume their actions are moral, and to experience personal dignity, prudence, piety, social standing, and sobriety appropriate to their station.
But ah, say you the reader, esthetic rules and the poetic understanding of the human condition held by artists, especially by purveyors of popular culture, have no practical place in Western thoughts concerning governance, social organization and general progress. We beg to differ.
We remind the reader that art and artists, particularly art devoted to the commonplace and ordinary business of life was, in the 19th century, argued by the great American poet/philosopher/social critic Walt Whitman, said to be the cure for the many ills Whitman said infected his USA at the perilous times before, during and after the American Civil War.
“Never was there … more hollowness at heart … here in the United States. Genuine belief [has] left us. … underlying principles … are not honestly believ’d in … [despite] melodramatic screamings, nor is humanity itself believ’d in.… The official services of America… are saturated in corruption … the one sole object is … pecuniary gain … money-making is … sole master….” Whitman’s cure for all this is the ritual of art and the genius of the artist.
“… The problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature.… Never was anything more wanted than … the poet … the central point in any nation … whence it sways others, is its national literature, especially its archetypal poems.“ What kind of poems? Whitman’s own, and he himself says the “swaying words” of his “barbaric yawp” shouted from rooftop to mountaintop: pop culture indeed.
If there could be a bridge without nails linking East with West, or a house without nails sheltering us all, Whitman thinks it could be built by art: “… There could hardly happen anything that would more serve the States, with all their variety of origins, their diverse climes, cities, standards, etc, than … to possess the aggregation of a cluster of mighty poets, artists, teachers … comprehending and effusing … what is universal, native, common to all….”
By the way, lest you should think that Whitman’s writers/poets/ritualists are “above” popular culture, remind yourself of his “Song of Myself”: “Creeds and schools in abeyance,/… I harbor for good or bad, / The spotted hawk … complains of my garb and my loitering./ I too am not a bit tamed — I too am untranslatable;/ I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
So, the idea of the healing, unifying and organizing power of the esthetic, culture, the “religion” of the “courtesy State” (a phrase once applied to China) and the stature give to the life habits of ordinary men and women is as much American as it is Asian.
What is our solution?
Our solution to the question “how shall East and West meet in conviviality, mutual trust and stability” is to remind our readers of the power and pervasiveness of popular culture, even including media such as Asia Times!
As we said at the top, we don’t ourselves have a filtering machine oiled up, warmed up, and ready to chew up the swirling and forever mixed mash-up of claims, “facts,” data points that surround us in the cloudy atmosphere of the internet. (Forgive us for writing a sentence in the spirit of Whitman – reading him has that sort of effect.) Our advice for the world’s leaders, especially for the leaders of China: open social media, and especially allow “free media trade” in art, music, literature and all “messaging aimed at the heart.” Our advice for all and any citizen of the two-hemisphere Pacific Coast world, use your heart perhaps even more than your head, respect the esthetic element in your human nature, when you make real-life choices, as a person or as a politician. Both classes of player will quickly discover how better to share the future.
Sources:
See a boy build one here: http://www.core77.com/posts/65043/Leonardo-da-Vincis-Ingenious-Design-for-a-Self-Supporting-Bridge)
(quotes from Whitman’s Democratic vistas http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/whitman/vistas/vistas.html)
Authors’ note: Our source book is Traditional Chinese Rites and Rituals by Ge Feng and Zhengming Du. [link doesn’t work -ds]
Asia Times is not responsible for the opinions, facts or any media content presented by contributors. In case of abuse, click here to report.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS MEDIA POPULAR CULTURE CONFUCIUS CONFUCISM ART NEWS FAKE NEWS SINO-AMERICAN RELATIONS SOCIOLOGY CHINA EAST AND WEST UNITED STATES LI-ZHI HOME RITUAL
Tom Velk is a libertarian-leaning American economist who teaches and lives in Montreal, Canada. He is the chairman of the North American studies program at McGill University and a professor in that university's economics department. Jade Xiao is a McGill University graduate.
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I agree that popular culture should be explorad as a diplomatic tool. Mainly in the sense of a bridge. For example, Portela Samba School, one of the greatest in Rio de Janeiro Carnival, will show the trajectory of the Jews who came with the Dutch to Brazil in 1630. As you know, they built a rich and influential community, but they were expelled again 24 years later when the Portuguese reconquered the power. In a hurry, a group of 23 refugees landed in New Amsterdam, now New York City. They founded the bases of the American Jewish Community, the second largest after Israel. The plot is based o...See More
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It is an amazing experience
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